Chef dragged the corpse through mud and weed and the dogs followed. Ahead was the town with its mess of gray slanted houses and shit roads and fat women on balconies, but each step in that direction felt like swimming farther and farther away, deeper and deeper into some dark pool of idiota. Chef limped slowly under the rot of sunless sky, ignoring the pain eating the insides of his leg. It felt warm. It felt raw. He wedged two fingers deep inside the cast and itched until the burn danced like fireworks up and down his body. He itched more. He pulled a stick off the ground, shoved it down the cast and jerked it furiously until his eyes were swimming and his head felt like jelly. He almost puked. When he heard the howls he dropped onto his stomach in the mud next to the dead man. Behind him and down the slope he could see the dark shapes trotting in the sand. They were going in circles trying to catch the scent. Chef’s hands fumbled inside his pockets searching for a cigarette. He offered one to the corpse. “Hey friend, you want?” Nada. The dead man’s face was covered with sand and a clump of seaweed hung from the neck. The dead man was quiet. It was like he was really dead.
When the dogs disappeared down the other end of the beach, Chef sat on the dead man’s stomach and enjoyed his cigarette. A few tourists climbing a sand dune spotted him and waved. Chef did not wave back. When they came closer one of the tourists, a bald man dressed like a banker on holiday, asked Chef if he was having difficulties. Fucking hell, Chef laughed. What a bunch of idiota.
“Your friend there looks sick,” the bald man said.
“We all got problems,” Chef said. He jammed his fingers into the dead man’s mouth and pulled them apart to force a smile.
“Jesus, that man’s dead,” the bald man said.
“He’s no Jesus,” Chef said. “This nada can’t walk on water. He drowned. I pulled him out of the water,” Chef said, nodding at the beach. “I saved him. He’s mine. Now fuck off.”
“Jesus, he’s dead,” the bald man said again. Chef laughed. The bald man and his lady friend hurried away.
Around the bend the dogs howled. Shit. They had found the scent. Chef wobbled to his feet. The wind almost knocked him over but he managed to find his balance. Chef and the drowned man kept moving, kept a steady pace ahead of the dogs that followed, kept waiting for a miserable end to this dance and wondered how in God he had ever arrived at such idiota.
Middle-aged and pretty much worn to guts, Chef had recently decided it was time to do something with his life. He had joined the army ten years ago hoping to find himself but instead found a scorching case of VD. When his tour finished he shot pool, drank whiskey, jerked off, cursed the government, and painted the occasional picture. He had man boobs. He lost the triple parlay by inches. His ex-girlfriend had stolen his car and was halfway to Vegas, leaving him with an assortment of Silver Surfer comics and a few Jethro Tull albums. He crashed a friend’s car into a lamppost. He was in a hospital where the only channel was Telemundo and all the doctors had faces like bleeding clowns. And then he flunked the biology exam at the community college because he couldn’t properly explain the differences in symbiosis between aquatic and terrestrial species? No. Hell no. The universe had pushed one button too many. Something had to be done.
He got shitfaced at the bar. Announcing his presence to his fellow bar patrons, he threatened to abuse the woman sitting next to him with his tongue, followed by a second threat to drink up the ocean and flood this establishment in his piss. Nobody listened. Chef finished his drink, saluted the barflies one last time, and declared he would walk out of this idiota into the deep blue sea. Good luck, the bartender said.
Swimming past the buoy, Chef discovered he was no good at drowning. He waited for a shark. He waited for the tide to suck him under. He saw a sea lion and held out his broken leg and screamed Bite me, fucker! but the sea lion disappeared behind a wave. He must have had some strange affinity for water because he floated miserably for more than an hour.
And then he found the corpse. It was just floating there, a fellow traveler. That was when Chef decided this was his moment of redemption: Chef the hero. Chef the savior. His ex-girlfriend had burnt all the photographs of them together saying there was nothing worth saving. She said her mother had warned her he would someday be a lousy father. He would show her. He would nurture this drowned man as if it were his own flesh and blood. By God, she would know that in suffering there was always something worth saving.
Chef and the drowned man washed ashore like mangled seaweed. Chef tried to breathe life into the man but without luck. The drowned man’s face was handsome but ugly, bloated and messy like an old hamburger bun. Patches around the forehead were blistered from the sun. Two fingers had been nibbled off. The man’s lips were purple, the eyes about to burst from their sockets. There was a note stuffed in the drowned man’s mouth. Our apologies to our dear friend, Fiske. A man of good taste, gone too far. Hanged, shot, stabbed, reluctantly drowned. Our apologies.
It was only a few minutes after washing ashore that Chef heard the dogs.
Chef determined not to let this opportunity go to waste. He would not leave the drowned man on some godforsaken beach to be devoured by dogs. He had no specific plan of what to do, but Chef was confident the genius of fatherhood did not descend all at once. It may take a while to figure out the next course of action, but he had all the time in the world. For now it was simple preservation. Alone they were nobodies, but together they would be somebody.
Chef listened for a heartbeat. The drowned man had been whispering. He was sure of it. Chef never heard things. He wasn’t religious. He pressed an ear close to the lips. He waited. Nada. “Speak up,” he told the drowned man. Nope, the man was drowned.
He kept dragging the body, sometimes wondering if they were walking in circles, other times unsure if he was dragging the drowned man or if the drowned man was dragging him.
The dogs were a blur in the endless ribbons of sand. Howls came in waves, louder at first, then echoes. Chef wasn’t sure where they came from. Maybe they were fascist dogs that did not approve of heroes or women in high heels. He turned in the direction of the howls, cupped his cock, and gave the mile-high salute.
Chef tore the shirt off his back. He rung out the sweat. He tied the shirt around the drowned man’s wrist into a knot. This made it easier to drag him. They moved in zigzag patterns through the dunes and weeds, hoping to confuse the dogs. “My apologies, Fiske,” Chef whispered.
When it was dark they hid in a ditch just below an overgrowth of wild grass. Chef gathered some rocks. When he heard howling he stumbled to his feet and hurled rocks until exhausted.
Chef and the drowned man played dead in the ditch. “Try not to look suspicious,” he whispered.
He tried to dream. It was useless. His leg was on fire. And the Gestapo canines kept howling. What could they possibly want? Maybe they were coming for him. No, they wanted the drowned man. Maybe they weren’t even dogs.
He patted the drowned man on the hand. “Don’t let them scare you,” he said. “We’re gonna make it, idiota. You and me.” The drowned man said nothing. Chef envied the drowned man’s ability to dream.
There was an old phone booth about a hundred yards from the ditch. Chef stuffed the two of them inside. He was having trouble seeing. His leg throbbed. He puked all over the drowned man. He dialed numbers at random and others from memory. The voice on the other end of the phone sounded like a queer robot. It seemed unconcerned with Chef’s predicament. Chef whispered into the receiver and the voice whispered back. Now the voice sounded like John Wayne. It all felt like a dream. Chef was crying. The howling was getting closer. Chef pushed his body against the adjustable doors of the phone booth. He held the drowned idiota close.
Wheels sputtered over the gravel, crawling within inches of Chef’s face. Hot steam chapped his already blistered lips. He was on his back in the mud. There were cigarette butts scattered on his chest. He rolled over and stood up. He was covered in strange hair. His knuckles were bleeding and as he limped he could see the shattered phone booth glass. The car horn blared. Chef teetered on his good leg, adjusted his pants and tried to give the driver a finger to suck on but forgot which was an insult and which was a precoital proposition. The last thing he needed was to tango with crazed homosexuals on a night like this.
“Hey, soldier!” the driver of the car yelled, pressing on the horn and sending a tornado of noise rattling through Chef’s ears. “You need a hand? Don’t be shy now!”
Chef didn’t answer the stranger. How long had it been? The sky was full of lavender streaks. He didn’t hear any dogs.
Words escaped him. He needed the right words. He needed to tell this stranger that he was too busy for shenanigans because he was being a hero. He dragged the drowned man out of the mud, subjecting his leg to more itching and burning.
“Get in, soldier,” the stranger said, rolling down the window. “You look like a man in need of being saved.”
“Are you the one I phoned?” Chef asked. He glanced nervously behind him. Still no dogs.
“Phone? Hell, I don’t believe in them. Not since Nixon. Look, do you want a lift or not?”
“Nada.”
“Suit yourself, soldier.”
“Wait,” Chef said. “The dogs are coming.”
“Amen. Get in, soldier.”
Chef pushed the drowned man’s corpse across the rear bench seat until the feet tucked under the body in an awkward fetal position. He used some of the newspaper on the floor to cover the body. Then he collapsed into the passenger seat. The car sped off.
Chef measured time by the stranger’s cigarettes. One. A dozen. Forty-six. He seemed to be doing it to drown out the odor of the dead man in the back seat.
“If you were to look up misery in a dictionary they’d have a picture of your face,” the stranger said. He laughed. He was at least a few dozen years older than Chef. He had a bushy black beard. He wore a cowboy hat with a silver band. The veins on his hands looked like railroad tracks. “Tell me your story, soldier,” the stranger said.
“I’m busted up,” Chef mumbled. “Caught up in some idiota.”
“Tell me something I don’t know. And don’t talk crazy. I don’t like men that talk like they’ve been inside the fun house.”
Chef cleared his throat. “The body’s mine. I found it. I was trying to save it from the goddamn dogs.” His head began to clear, the pain drifted, although he could still feel the saltwater and other vermin creeping about and infesting the insides of his leg. He rolled down the window to let the breeze wake him.
The stranger looked at the corpse in the back seat. “Sure, sure,” he said. “I wouldn’t try to take him from you. I know what it’s like to save something. Believe me. I’ve been in your shoes.”
Chef stared at his bare feet. He wasn’t sure if that should make him feel relieved or nervous. He still hadn’t quite decided if what he was doing was grotesque or divine.
“Name’s Chef,” he said, shutting his eyes and waving away smoke.
“Gabe Fishmonger. Guess you could say I’m your guardian angel tonight.” Chef eyed the stranger nervously. “I know. Idiotic name, right? Goddamn Russian ancestors knew only one English word when they came here. One lousy word so everybody knew what line of work they did. I don’t know who’s dumber: people that open their mouths to tell the truth or people who close their ears so they don’t have to listen. That’s America for you. Get labeled one thing and it sticks with you for this life and the next. Like flies on shit.”
The car raced around bends and down hills. The highway became a gray bullet.
“That was our town,” Chef said. “We passed it.”
“Was, soldier. We’re moving on to greener pastures.”
“I didn’t kill him,” Chef said suddenly, jerking his head around to make sure the drowned man didn’t fly out the window. The car was really cruising now, vibrating like it might fall apart. Chef worried this Fishmonger was some avenging angel come to drive him out to the middle of nowhere and punish him for his crimes. Or worse, drive him out to the middle of nowhere and take away his chance at heroism.
“Don’t apologize. Sometimes a man just needs to be killed.”
“Found him in the ocean,” Chef said. “Goddamn hero, right?”
“Shit, they don’t make men like us anymore,” Fishmonger smiled. He bit down on a rusty dog tag hanging around his neck and hacked out a laugh. “The world needs more men of our kind.”
“Wherever you’re taking us, just make sure the dogs don’t follow. There must have been a thousand of them.”
Fishmonger said, “Where we’re going there is no coming back.” Then he laughed. “Don’t mind me. I’m just talking crazy.”
They must have driven damn near a hundred miles away from the coast. It took hours, maybe days, driving through wasted gray towns that disappeared under endless miles of orange dust. When he was awake, Chef felt as though he was caught in a bad dream and tried falling back asleep. When he slept, he felt trapped in a nightmare and kept trying to wake himself up.
Soon they were the only car on a narrowing road.
At first, Chef thought this Fishmonger was a diabolical Columbus who had driven him off the end of a flat earth, but then he realized it was the desert. He wondered how close they were to Vegas, how close they were to his ex-girlfriend. He wanted to kill Fishmonger for bringing him here, for reminding him. Or maybe this was a chance to make amends. Maybe he could talk to her. Maybe he could show her he was a changed man. He wasn’t the same guy who followed her home from the movie theater, or watched her from the skylight as she read cheap romance novels, or came in through her window while she slept and left the bathtub full of flower petals. He was different now. Being intimate with the dead had saved him in a strange way.
Fishmonger’s ramshackle house was at the end of a road to nowhere. He said he hadn’t lived in it for many years. Collapsed roof. Shattered windows. There was a shed about fifty yards down the slope where Fishmonger said he had all the essentials. They carried bundles of newspaper from the trunk inside the house that was filled floor to ceiling with stacks of newspaper. What wasn’t newspaper was junk: cardboard boxes, oily rags, photographs, ribbons, honorary medals, and a television set lying on its side with the screen kicked in and a photograph of a woman taped over the hole. Chef tried to find a good place to sit down. When he did he peeled back the edge of the cast and winced. It smelled terrible.
“Pour some whiskey on that shit,” Fishmonger said, tossing him a bottle.
Chef drank. The insides of his head were a melted Ice Age.
“You never told me what happened to the leg, soldier.”
“Accident,” Chef gargled.
Fishmonger leaned back on the stack of newspaper he was using as a sofa. He sucked in his cheeks. “Nope, nope, nope,” he said. “It merely appears to be an accident. It might even appear to be a mystery, but it is fate. We were destined to find each other, you and me. God is a door-to-door salesman of mystery, soldier. We just need the courage to open the door and buy in bulk.”
“No,” Chef said, patting his broken leg. “Accident. Girl trouble.” He thought it best to disagree and leave it at that. There was no telling what this poor idiota was capable of.
“You see that car?” Fishmonger said, pointing out the window. There was an old pickup showered in rust. “That was hers. I pay a kid to come once a week to piss all over it. Gives me wood to watch him do it, swear to god. No offense. Sometimes he slashes a tire or uses the crowbar on the windshield. But I prefer it when he pisses. I don’t have the courage to do it myself.”
Chef looked around the room as if he had heard none of it. “What is it you do?”
Fishmonger let out a deep breath. “Good question. No pity party, you hear? Me? I survive. This place was ours. Was, mind you. She moved on. I live out in the shed. Doesn’t smell like her out there. I figure when the time is right the Lord will smite this Gomorrah with a plague.”
“What now?” Chef asked, hoping to steer the conversation somewhere else.
Fishmonger stared at the ceiling. There was a long, awkward silence.
“I figure we better wash that body,” he said.
Fishmonger had no difficulty pulling the corpse out of the car and slinging it over his shoulder like a deer carcass. They spent the night washing it clean, combing the hair, manicuring the nails, and brushing his teeth. They stripped the corpse naked and pulled the critters out of him with tweezers. Then they dressed him in Fishmonger’s Sunday best. Chef knew they had to act fast. He had paid attention in biology class. Decomposition was not something to celebrate.
That night there was a vigil. They put the body in a wicker trunk. They lit candles. Fishmonger offered the prayers and read other passages from the Bible. It was pitiful, but Chef was not about to argue with this idiota. His only suggestion was that the drowned man might not have been a Christian so perhaps they should give him all the last rites they could think of, just in case. Fishmonger agreed. They got out a broken trumpet from the attic and took turns trying to play jazz. They shared cigarettes with the corpse. They placed coins over his eyes and in his mouth, but Fishmonger said he needed a beer for where he was going. They put a six-pack in the trunk along with some pieces of stale fried chicken.
They admired the drowned man’s hands, the curls in his hair, the religion still impressed in his eyes, and the narcissism in the way he lay there without giving a damn. They wondered how many men he had killed, how many mothers he must have made weep, how many children dreamed of being like him.
“This is no man,” Fishmonger said. “This is a fucking constellation. He belongs with his kind in the stars.”
Later, they buried him in an unmarked grave not far from a small thicket of trees in a stretch of dust and cactus. Chef smoked and watched while Fishmonger worked the shovel and pickax. It was a shallow grave.
“What a lovely fucking treasure,” Fishmonger said. “We are some heroes, right, soldier?”
Gunfire startled Chef out of his dreams and, believing they were under attack, he performed a shitty half-somersault across the shed floor. Pain danced up his leg and into his crotch. Another burst of gunfire, then laughter, and after sufficient silence Chef looked up and saw a shirtless Fishmonger standing over him.
“Here they come,” Fishmonger grinned. “The enemy arrives for invasion.”
It was coyotes. Dozens of them.
“What do they want?” Chef said. He was nervous. Fishmonger pointed to the unmarked grave among the cactus.
“Isn’t it obvious? They’ve come for the drowned man.”
Every time Fishmonger shot a coyote the others skittered off for a few hours. When they returned, Fishmonger shot another and the cycle repeated itself. Vultures descended. Soon their black feathered corpses lay among those of the wounded and dying coyotes. The coyotes snacked on the birds, but mostly they unearthed the corpse bit by bit, digging up a little here and there. It was a little dance. Dig a little, retreat and circle. Dig a little, retreat and circle.
“Amateurs,” Fishmonger whispered. He shot a coyote between the eyes.
This far away in the desert every gunshot echoed until the only sound was echoes of echoes. The men kept track of time by monitoring the coyotes. Some internal instinct compelled the creatures to circle back around every sixty-five minutes. It’s like they too could not resist the corpse, prisoners to their biology. The more coyotes Fishmonger killed, the more coyotes appeared with the pack the next time. Maybe there were that many coyotes in the desert, or maybe killing them was really bringing them to life. It was like some strange but intoxicating mitosis.
When the coyotes returned they writhed in slow circles, snouts lifted. With every gunshot they scattered and disappeared into the trees or left clouds of dust. Then they charged, dug around the corpse, and ran off before the next shot.
“That dead man is our stewardship. We must not fail him,” Fishmonger said as he reloaded the rifle. “Faith binds us. Faith in instinct. Faith that he is dead and must remain dead under the earth where he belongs. Faith to pull the trigger and kill our brother coyotes. Faith that their animal hunger will bring them to us. Faith that my instinct is true. Faith that what we do is honorable. Faith that the circle will continue.”
“Jesus Christ,” Chef said, “you are a fucking loon.”
He thought of escaping, but where would he escape to? And what was to stop Fishmonger from burying him with the drowned man?
After a few days, bits and pieces of the drowned man began to poke through the dust and it seemed as if he was trying to resurrect himself. Flies swarmed and laid their eggs. The coyotes fought for scraps. Fishmonger gathered the tools.
“He must be something holy if they want him so bad.” He opened the shed door. “We best bury him again.”
Chef watched the crazy old idiota walk up the dusty path hauling a bucket of water and a shovel. The coyotes had run off to the trees where they waited patiently. They seemed to understand this was all part of some game of which they were necessary participants. Fishmonger bowed to them, as if he too was enjoying this game.
The two men kicked away coyote carcasses and wrenched free the drowned man. His face had been gnawed up. He looked nothing holy, just a rotten drowned man without any peace in this world or any other.
“The nerve of this sonfabitch to try and be reborn,” Fishmonger said. He poured water on the grave to loosen the soil. He started digging a deeper grave. Chef used a bucket to collect stray pieces of the drowned man.
“Leave him. This is his fate. What God has taken we cannot unravel.”
Chef ignored him and gathered pieces of the drowned man. He held them gently, wondering if these bone chips were dead man or dead coyote.
“You say I’m sick in the head but here I am trying to bury this poor devil and there you are collecting pieces of him. Who is the diseased and who is the doctor I ask?”
“You need therapy,” Chef said.
“Therapy is alright. It can be therapeutic,” Fishmonger said.
“You’re a masochist.”
“I’ve never believed in the Mormons.”
“No, masochist,” Chef said.
“Yes, I have good reasons not to believe the Mormons,” Fishmonger said, preparing one of his sermons that by now Chef was all too familiar with. “There’s a guy up the river, big chap with cankers all around his lips. Each canker’s like its own little smile. That’s just the way the world is, I suppose: some people have cankers, and others, well, others get washed up on the ocean shore.” He aimed for the tree line, fired twice. “So this Mormon fella had a beautiful woman. Curvy. Smelled like fruit. But his business, his true love, was hogs. Best bacon you’ll eat this side of the mountain. They eat their young, you know? The hogs, I say, not the Mormons. I don’t know what Mormons do for food.” Fishmonger lit a new cigarette and continued about how the Mormon cowboy’s wife would deliver ten pounds of bacon once a month and eventually they went to bed. “We were happy,” he smiled. He fired at the coyotes again. “Then one day she stopped coming. Made me crazy. Looked for her but never found her. It was only later I learned her husband killed her. Butchered her up on the Sabbath. Fed her to his hogs. He still brought me the bacon. For six months I ate the hogs that had eaten her. Never tasted the difference. We loved too much and it cost us both in the end.”
Chef stretched inside the empty bathtub. His shit leg hung over the porcelain edge. Fishmonger poured steaming water into the tub. He left the shed and returned with more buckets. He told Chef he needed his strength. He touched Chef’s hair. How else would he find romance again? Chef closed his eyes. When he opened them Fishmonger was gone.
The shed was a mess. Old tin containers and rusted forks, buckets of water, bullets on the floors and windowsills, the smell of rubber and piss. There were buckets of bone fragments. There was hardly anything left of the drowned man now but pieces. The game was almost finished.
Chef had promised himself he would gather what pieces he could, as much as he could, remains they could identify, and when he got back to town he would find Fiske’s widow or his parents or anybody who knew Fiske and deliver the remains so he could be dead in peace. Somebody had to be looking for him. Somebody was losing sleep. This was no way to die. He just hoped to live long enough to do this one good thing.
Maybe Fishmonger was trying to fool him. Maybe Fishmonger had guessed his plan. Maybe while Chef slept the old man stole the bone fragments and buried them just for Chef to collect them the following mornings, just to keep him here, to keep the game going.
He held the bones between his fingers and used an old rag to clean them. “Apologies, Fiske,” he said.
Chef tried to stir his senses: where he was, what he was doing. He did not remember how many days they had passed in the shed. They had pissed in empty whiskey bottles, sometimes forgetting which bottles were whiskey and which were piss. He hobbled to the window, looked out and saw nothing but dust and cactus. Fishmonger’s thin shadow in the distance. He was burying the corpse again. Chef aimed the rifle at the old man’s throat.
“Pow,” he whispered.
That night Fishmonger did not return. Chef waited alone, counting the coyotes on the ridge. The next morning Fishmonger was in the shed but the two men did not speak. Fishmonger tossed the pickax and shovel into a corner. Chef went back to work on the new assortment of bones he had collected. Fishmonger seemed disgusted by this. He ate from a can of beans with his fingers.
“They’ve devoured him,” he said. “Nothing but pieces. In time, the Lord will provide a new stewardship. But until then we must make our stand against them. Keep the faith, brother.”
That afternoon Fishmonger shot the coyotes and Chef reloaded the rifle. When he looked out the window all he could see were coyotes.
“Jesus, where the hell did they all come from?”
In that moment Chef envied them. They had a brotherhood. They had a purpose. They had instinct. And behind all that there was a sense of heroism in what they did. Either that or it was a whole mess of idiota.
Chef hobbled under the stars. The night was idle. With each step sand squirmed between his toes, as if exhausted with this endless charade of beasts. He dropped to his knees after he climbed up the ridge. The shed was a mere thirty yards behind him. The coyotes were close, and when Chef growled they circled closer. Bent on all fours, his hands fumbled in the darkness for pieces of Fiske.
Is that you? he whispered. Where have you gone, amigo? Are you nada? Are you idiota? he laughed.
Behind him Fishmonger screamed: “Salvation!”
Gunfire echoed. Clumps of dirt sprayed. The old cowboy was crouched in the shed doorway, mostly naked. He reloaded. Jesus. The goddamned crazy was shooting. Chef tried to yell but when he opened his mouth it filled with greedy laughs and howls. Then he howled again until his insides burned, head low to avoid Fishmonger’s misfires. The coyotes swarmed, lapping gray tongues on his legs and belly. Chef ignored them. He tore the cast from his leg, exposing the raw flesh, and zigzagged back and forth among the pack. He felt free. He felt for the first time, twisted there on all fours, like he too was nada. More gunfire. A coyote head exploded. Chef could hear Fishmonger giggling. A wounded coyote twisted closer in the dark and coughed blood into his lap. As its breathing slowed, an eye blinked and blinked. “Apologies,” Chef whispered. Welcome to the nada. Welcome to the idiota. Chef pawed at the dust, pulling back dark sweeps of tumbleweed and dirt only to discover old copper coins, those they had stuffed into the drowned man’s mouth. There were bones, too: scraps of femur and clavicle, even broken teeth. Fishmonger kept firing, kept screaming Salvation! Salvation! and Chef clawed at the dust until his fingers bled and he had unearthed Fiske’s jawbone. He held it against the soft flesh of his cheek, this lovely mask. Such an idiota, he grinned, and laughed heroically as he held on to what remained.